Category: Portfolio

I pitched, developed and managed a partnership with Development Seed to execute the engineering and presentation of results displays for the 2016 election cycle. I was the project lead, working across multiple departments internally and externally to manage contracts, understand and prioritize needs, develop strategy, test and improve the technology and brief stakeholders.

These maps ran across The Washington Post products, including our site and native applications on iOS and Android, and many of our news service client sites.

Role: Editing, project management

My team also created dozens of other fantastic graphics for the election, collected here.

I was the lead editor and project manager on this 3-part series, which explained the rise of barriers worldwide as a means of preventing migration and providing border security. It explored their effectiveness and impact in a deeply compelling narrative that melded text, video and graphics in ways we haven’t tried before. My team led the field reporting in collaboration with foreign correspondents, and I led the editing team, which also included a video editor and the foreign editor.

Role: Editing, project management, storyboarding, prototyping

Awards: Malofiej International Infographics Awards Human Rights Best Graphics Award and Gold medal in features category; Gold medal in the Society of News Design digital awards; Finalist for a Webby award; White House News Photographers Association, First place in Best Multimedia Package; First prize in Innovative Storytelling in World Press Photo’s 2017 Digital Storytelling Contest

This series about the recovery of the U.S. housing market was instigated by Ted Mellnik, one of our best data reporters. Emily Badger from the Wonkblog came on board and Darla Cameron explored many kinds of visual approaches. Denise Lu took over for Darla when she went on maternity leave and Madia Brown worked on design of the stories that followed the overview.

For digital audiences, we created a geo-focused story with text customized to your zip code, featuring an interactive map of home value changes over the past decade. For print, we combined the Stockton, Calif., story together with the overview of findings that we had online.

Working with our newsletters editor, we created a very successful email campaign that sent emails to readers from the different cities we covered in the series. I love the clean design, simple and intuitive user interface, clear writing and navigation.

When Snowzilla was looming, I started to wonder whether it was going to be as big as Snowmageddon — the craziest stormstorm I’d experienced in my life. I thought there was a comparison graphic to be done there and as the team was hustling on several other snow pieces (like this, this and this), I decided I would do it. I started it at about 4:30 p.m. and it was up early the following morning.

A few months earlier, I had had the crazy idea to use the browser window as a “water tank” to show how drought was affecting California’s reservoirs — Katie Park took that rough concept and ran with it, creating this great graphic that won a silver medal at SND Digital. With the snow coming, I started thinking about how I could compare the predicted snowfall for the upcoming storm with totals from history using the same concept — filling the browser window with the snow.

I figured out how Snowzilla compared, repurposed some of the code Katie wrote for the water piece, learned how to use CSS animations to make snow fall in the background, drew a silly snowman to give scale to the depth of the snow and put this simple piece out into the world.

If we do something like this again in the future, I’d love to make this run off live data. We could pull in the snowfall totals as they accumulate and animate the “snowflakes” and snow drifts in the graphic so they reflect the storm as it happens.

Samuel Granados pitched a trip to Lesbos to tell the story of the migrant crisis in a visual way. I thought it was a great idea, we got the room excited about it and Samuel and Zoeann Murphy went to the island and reported this amazing story. When they returned, we had a ton of material to work with and had to spend quite a bit of time crafting the narrative and story structure.

After a lot of whiteboarding and brainstorming with the team, which also included Emily Chow and Kevin Schaul, I suggested doing a “tap essay,” inspired by Robin Sloan’s project Fish. We’d keep the number of slides succinct and we’d also offer readers the chance to go down different offshoots, but always come back to a central narrative. This was my first sketch of the “offshoot” concept (on the far right of the board):

We decided to pursue that concept and I created a prototype in Keynote, based on Samuel and Zoeann’s notes, visuals, and early narrative constructs, that demonstrated the functionality of the tap essay and the offshoots:

That very first UI prototype was taken from concept to reality through some truly impressive, smart and endlessly creative work by Samuel, Kevin, Zoeann and Emily, and with some important help from Griff Witte, our correspondent in the area.

We really wanted the experience to feel simple, elegant and powerful. We didn’t want extraneous UI to interfere with the user’s natural behavior as they moved through the story. We had a fantastic completion rate on the project and we found that more than half of people opted in to the offshoots.

This story was an amazing collaborative effort driven by visual reporting. I love how it works beautifully, but differently, on desktop and mobile devices — mostly due to some really smart engineering by Kevin!

The title “The Waypoint” was one of my contributions. I love headlines!

These debate deconstructions have been a fantastic collaboration led by Samuel Granados and have included a bunch of different folks in the team. I love their simplicity, playfulness and visual approach. I’ve helped construct the narratives, design some of the visual elements, and write the text.

This project, the result of many months of detailed data analysis and reporting, was the product of a wonderful collaboration between reporters, designers and developers. My team was responsible for the graphics, template design and full-stack development. I helped refine and edit the graphics and overall design, keep the project on schedule and stakeholders informed, and develop and style small front-end components.

Design Director Greg Manifold and I prototyped an experience for this story. We wanted to emphasize the exceptional photography and make the introduction highly visual, captivating and emotional. We hoped that would hook readers into a deep reading experience. I suggested contextual mapping: when a place is mentioned in the narrative, it is highlighted in the accompanying map. Emily Yount, Emily Chow, Seth Blanchard and Lazaro Gamio took the rough prototype we built and transformed it into this wonderful project.

I worked with Emily Chow on this project that tests users’ ability to pick misspelled words out of sentences. The Scripps spelling bee is a popular annual event, and we wanted to make a fun app that capitalized on reader interest in the event. All our competitors were making games that asked you to spell complicated words — not something you’re asked to do every day. But you do read and write every day, and I pitched the idea of highlighting the most common mistakes people make and pushed to develop a piece that allowed users to see mistakes that the other folks who took this quiz made. Emily did the heavy lifting on vote counting development and displays, and I wrote the silly sentences and finessed the design. It got enormous reader response — almost 300,000 readers answered the first question.

Note: If you view this project today, it takes a while for the results to pull in. This is due to dependency on deprecated site services — a lot changes in a year in the news business!

Motion graphics for the 2012 election

During the 2012 primary season, we started talking about how to tell the story of the election as a whole. I worked with AJ Chavar, video editor, Sohail Al-Jamea, motion designer, and Karen Yourish and Chris Cillizza, reporters, to storyboard and produce this motion graphic, which led our site the morning after Barack Obama won re-election. We did extensive storyboarding to ensure we would be prepared no matter the outcome of the election. I’m proud of this video because it’s fast-paced, has a great storyline and uses compelling graphics and smart visual approaches to keep the viewer’s attention.